Young Americans find roots in China / S.F. program offers history and genealogy, helps locate relatives

Olivia Wu, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PST, Sunday, February 18, 2007

KaiPing, Guang Dong, CHINA - JULY 6: Brian Jamie Lee takes pictures of his ancestors's portrait, in his ancestral home at a village near KaiPing city, Guang Dong province, China on 6 July 2006. (Photo by Kevin Lee for San Francisco Chronicles) Ran on: 02-18-2007
Brian Lee of San Anselmo takes pictures of his ancestors' portraits in China's Guangdong province during a visit to his ancestral village. less

KaiPing, Guang Dong, CHINA - JULY 6: Brian Jamie Lee takes pictures of his ancestors's portrait, in his ancestral home at a village near KaiPing city, Guang Dong province, China on 6 July 2006. (Photo by Kevin ... more

Photo: Kevin Lee

Photo: Kevin Lee

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KaiPing, Guang Dong, CHINA - JULY 6: Brian Jamie Lee takes pictures of his ancestors's portrait, in his ancestral home at a village near KaiPing city, Guang Dong province, China on 6 July 2006. (Photo by Kevin Lee for San Francisco Chronicles) Ran on: 02-18-2007
Brian Lee of San Anselmo takes pictures of his ancestors' portraits in China's Guangdong province during a visit to his ancestral village. less

KaiPing, Guang Dong, CHINA - JULY 6: Brian Jamie Lee takes pictures of his ancestors's portrait, in his ancestral home at a village near KaiPing city, Guang Dong province, China on 6 July 2006. (Photo by Kevin ... more

Photo: Kevin Lee

Young Americans find roots in China / S.F. program offers history and genealogy, helps locate relatives

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2007-02-18 04:00:00 PDT Zhongshan, China -- There are hundreds of thousands of ties between the Bay Area and the southern Guangdong, most of them broken and worn. But Cory Chu-Keenan and 11 other young adults traveled more than 6,000 miles in hopes of renewing them.

The 27-year-old, born and raised in San Francisco, was in this village -- the place his great-great-grandfather was born -- to try to find some trace of his family and his past.

"I've always wanted to know the Chinese side of my family," said Chu-Keenan, who is of German-Irish descent on his father's side and Chinese on his mother's. "I grew up in Chinatown, and all my friends are Chinese."

The 11 Bay Area residents, ages 16 to 27, traveling with him were in a similar position. They were tracing their ancestry through the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco's annual In Search of Roots program -- a yearlong process that begins with lessons in genealogy, in Chinese American history and in recording oral histories with living relatives.

The program -- the only one of its kind in the United States -- culminates with a monthlong visit to China, with each of the participants making a pilgrimage to an ancestral home.

These young people, like many children and grandchildren of immigrants, feel the pull of competing identities. One, which their elders endured much to give them, is squarely in the mainstream of American society, where they are ensconced in popular culture and striving to blend in.

The other, which those same elders don't want to see sacrificed to assimilation, is rooted in Chinese tradition. It is defined by a reverence for old customs, an understanding of roots and a respect for what was lost in the diaspora.

This conflict creates confusion. The young people know they're American but also Chinese. They know much about what it means to be an American but little about being Chinese. And age and language barriers only exaggerate the feeling of disconnectedness.

This program helps them make the two halves of their lives coherent. It focuses on the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, especially around the town of Taishan (Toysan in Cantonese, the dominant language of the region), where most of San Francisco's 19th- and early 20th-century immigrants were born.

Taishan, a farming town with a population of 1 million today, has seen 1.3 million emigrate over the years, according to local records. The exodus began 150 years ago, when desperate farmers walked days from the hamlets near the port city of Guangzhou, got on boats and sailed off for another chance.

Many headed for meiguo, the "Beautiful Country," especially jinsan (in Cantonese, gumsan) or "Gold Mountain" -- in other words, America and San Francisco. Chinese American historian Him Mark Lai, using 1988 data, placed the number of Taishanese in the United States at around 430,000, or about 70 percent of Chinese Americans in the United States in the 1980s. That number is estimated at half a million today.

The 16-year-old program of the San Francisco center is largely the brainchild of Albert Cheng, an educator with a keen interest in genealogy and guiding youthful hearts and minds. When he offered the first class, just 10 days after the Loma Prieta earthquake, 100 people showed up. The center took seriously this surge of interest and fashioned In Search of Roots for 16- to 26-year-olds. The program -- which has touched the lives of nearly 200 participants -- requires a one-year commitment and costs about $2,000, depending on travel expenses.

During their time in China, participants rode buses to nearby municipalities such as Kaiping (Hoyping in Cantonese) along pristine white concrete highways that suddenly turned off onto dirt roads, from First World to Third World. Sometimes the bumpy dirt roads lurched and bounced past fields and ponds tended for centuries, and by clusters of half-deserted farmhouses.

Chu-Keenan's quest meant the group was cruising toward the town of Zhongshan on the first day of what was called "Cory's rooting." And Chu-Keenan was worried about how much they would discover about his family.

The night before, he had attended a formal intake interview with the other participants and Cheng told the group, "Cory's case has been the hardest one to crack."

During his research, Chu-Keenan had failed to find one family anecdote, artifact or piece of history with which to start his search. Visits to the National Archives in San Francisco and surrounding cemeteries yielded nothing. Finally, in a telephone conversation with an aunt in Sacramento, he learned that some ceramic bowls in his mother's kitchen had been marked with the Chinese character of the family name, a vital clue. The character, Hee, could be directly traced to Pangsha village in Zhongshan municipality.

Lai, the historian and author, loaned him a book of the Hee family association of Hawaii. Chu-Keenan's great-aunt was its president, and the book contained many photos of his family members.

Nearing the village, Chu-Keenan's anxiety became more palpable. A year of preparatory work -- paper searches and a trail of interviews -- that began in late 2005 was coming to fruition.

"I'm excited," Chu-Keenan said. "I slept about two hours last night."

Once out of the bus, various officials of Zhongshan -- who did the local legwork -- led Chu-Keenan to Pangsha. One of them told him, "We don't know enough so we could not find your ancestral home or a relative." Still, he will see the village.

Referring to the hand-drawn map in the Hee association book, the officials began querying the oldest residents. "This is where the old town wall used to begin," Cheng translated, pointing to a rocky, dilapidated fragment.

Chu-Keenan, who speaks only English, had to pay close attention as, one by one, some of the village elders approached him. One directed them down an alley to a building -- the ancestral temple of the village. A shrine there provided details about three generations of the Hee family, Chu-Keenan's maternal ancestors. It was built in the mid-1800s, at about the time his great-great-grandfather set off for Hawaii. Cheng told Chu-Keenan that he was lucky to have found this proof of the family in the village.

Later, after the group traipsed around the east side of the village, one elder after another looked at the Hee family book. Chu-Keenan held it up and officials flipped through the pages. Seniors, stooped and gray but all extremely lucid, shook their heads, then walked away.

Finally, a dignified septuagenarian stood before him. Very quietly, as her eyes followed the pages, she muttered, "That's my father."

Over the cacophony of dialects, Cheng translates for Chu-Keenan: She remembered going to Hawaii, then to Japan, before returning with her mother "during President Hoover," she said.

Chu-Keenan could barely take his eyes off the face of this distant, newfound cousin. They posed for formal pictures, standing awkwardly. As the group departed, with no language in common, he waved to her and she lifted her hand in response.

"It was so much more than I expected," he said as the bus left the village. "Today, I feel as Chinese as I've ever felt."

The Chinese Culture Center's Roots program has existed for 16 years; Cheng has led and taught it for the past 14, and he selects each group of 12 participants. Most are college students or recent graduates. Some are high school students. Cheng shapes the experience as a search for cultural and personal identity, and he gives them plenty of room to express their doubts and hopes.

But there is no way to prepare students for the visceral impact that comes when each crosses a threshold and joins past to present in a way that inevitably informs the future. Over the course of their trip, the emotional impact of being Chinese emerged in different ways for each of the 12.

"I don't look Chinese, do I?" said Chris Dong-Placencia, the night before he reached his ancestral village. Dong-Placencia's mother is a third-generation Chinese American; his father is Mexican. Yet the deep connections with his Chinese grandparents, who raised him, brought him here.

Most of the participants visited ancestral hamlets with populations of about 200, where farming is done largely by centuries-old methods. Old and new worlds, poor and rich, rural and urban came together in the few hours that each person spent with their families.

"Coming here is like touching a nerve. No, it's like pulling at something," said Dong-Placencia, 20, of Alameda. At Liangang Li, the village to which his grandfather sent money from America, Dong-Placencia was welcomed like a dignitary. At the elementary school he was greeted by a big sign that included his Chinese name, Deng Riguang.

For Leonard Shek of San Francisco, standing at the gate of Panchong Li village was like "connecting two ends."

"It's important to me to know where we came from," said Shek, a 27-year-old son of immigrants. "My family has a lot of disjointed stories just from the wars, from different marriages, and it's unnerving not to be able to trace your roots back past your grandparents. Some people don't even have their grandparents."

While standing at the gate, he got a call from San Francisco. It was his father.

"I'm about to walk in, Dad," he said, his voice cracking.

Moments later, one of the villagers, plucking a chicken, told him, "You look like your father."

Then Shek and the rest of the group trekked up a mountain to the cemetery where his grandparents and great-grandfather were buried. Shek performed the rites of ancestral respect; he lighted candles and incense and performed nine bows at each grave. As his distant relative and Cheng coached him, he offered wine and then poured it around the incense.

For Jonathan and Tiffany Tsang, the visit to the birthplace of their grandfather was a more light-hearted event. The brother, 25, and sister, 21, from Union City chased chickens around the village and had no serious expectations -- though they had some hope -- that the visit might shed some light on their aloof grandfather, someone, said Tiffany, "who we just sit with at dinner in Chinatown and who never says anything to us."

But mirth soon gave way to tears during their next stop, in Zhugang, the village of their grandmother. Tiffany Tsang broke down at the sight of a distant relative, a female farmer, whose behavior reminded her of her grandmother.

"I'd never met this woman before, and here she was taking me by the hand and explaining to me everything in the house," Tsang later said. "I was treated like family the moment I arrived. She went over pictures with me that we found in my ancestral house and tried to explain who everyone was, all the time never letting go of my hand until I boarded the bus."

Brian Lee of San Anselmo was the only one of the group who was unclear about why he had come. At 16, the youngest participant is a reserved, lanky junior at Sir Francis Drake High School. He told none of his friends that he was tracing his roots in China.

"I had (met) only one grandfather and I don't remember him much. Then he died," he said. He knew that his original Chinese family name was Hu, so his genealogy was relatively easy to trace.

As the bus pulled up to the wealthy hamlet of Changxing Li, Edwardian-inspired, turreted houses and a luxuriant patchwork of rice fields greeted them. Also present was a distant relative of Lee's -- one of the family members who had been taking care of the farmhouse. She looked closely at him, then grabbed his hand and led him down the alley to his maternal grandfather's house, the one with the tallest tower. She had prepared the candles and incense for him to pay his respects to his ancestors. She then showed him how to use an iron hook to pick the huangpi fruit off the tall trees from the second-floor veranda.

Lee stretched his gangly arms to point a digital camera at everything in sight. When he climbed to the third story and saw the spread of farmland below, curiosity overpowered his shyness. "Is all this land ours?" The American-born kid who had never been to a farm before lingered in the rice paddies, awed by the scale of things -- the big sky and far-off horizon. "It was so peaceful out there," he later said.

There was one more surprise for him: a visit to the village of his paternal grandfather, where Lee spent a long time inside an abandoned farmhouse.

"I got to walk the same floors that my grandfathers walked on when they were little. I felt my grandfather there," he said.

Although Lee was clearly moved the by experience, it didn't come easily. He hesitated before entering the house, unsure, until Cheng, the leader, encouraged him.

"Do it. It's important," he urged. "This is not just your Chinese experience. It's an experience that makes you American. Remember that."

Cheng reminded Lee that few people in the world have the opportunity and freedom to search for their roots. Americans are particularly fortunate in that they can. But it gives them a responsibility, he said, because so many Americans do not know where they come from or how they found their new homeland.

How American they are was expressed by Chu-Keenan after he returned home.

"I'm feeling a fire within, a renewed energy," he said. "I feel the urge to make my time count and work really hard. It comes from seeing the hardships of emigration."

In Search of Roots

-- An exhibit about the In Search of Roots program will be on display March 2 through May 19 at the Chinese Culture Center, 750 Kearny St., San Francisco. The 2006 participants will present a program about their experience at 1 p.m. March 17. Both are open to the public. For more information, call (415) 986-1822.